Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

In the 1979 film “Being There,“  Chance (Peter Sellers) goes from an illiterate, TV-watching, not-too-swift gardener for a wealthy Washington, D.C. family to the confidant of a dying financial titan Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) who is on a first name basis with the President of the United States (Jack Warden).

This turnabout occurs after Chance’s wealthy employer dies and lawyers for the heirs leave Chance without a penny and kick him out of the only home he has known. Well tailored–-he kept the custom-tailored suits of his employer–-courteous and with a certain presence but completely unaware of life, he wanders into downtown D.C. where the chauffered Cadillac of Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), the wife of the financial titan, accidentally knocks Chance down. To make amends for the accident, Eve Rand brings him home to see Ben’s personal doctor. In the back seat of the limousine, when asked his name he says: “Chance the gardener.” Eve hears  “Chauncey Gardiner.”

Introduced to Ben Rand, the two men hit it off with Chauncey often repeating the last line that Ben had said. When the President comes to see Rand, his primary financial backer, he meets Chauncey. After the President’s asks Ben’s advice on an economic speech he plans to give to  prominent CEOs, he turns to Chauncey and asks what he thinks. Chauncey doesn’t have a clue about what the President is talking about but responds with a metaphor about planting in the Spring, harvesting in the Fall, and fallow fields in the Winter. The next day, the President uses the metaphor with the CEOs and mentions Chauncey Gardiner. In hours, Chauncey appears on national TV and again talks in metaphors of flowers and seasons which listeners hear as pearls of wisdom. He becomes a star among the political and corporate elite. At the end of the film, the pallbearers of Ben Rand’s coffin–all industrial and financial leaders–are talking about running Chauncey for President.

I offer this extended summary of this satiric and witty film about wealthy people because it illustrates the frequent errors all of us make daily of projecting onto individuals brilliance and wisdom on the basis of a few cues while ignoring the situation or context. Academics call this the error of attribution.

An example of this error in education would be attributing gains in academic achievement to officials buying laptops and tablets for students. Consider the story of Union City, New Jersey, a district where student use of computers had presumably led to substantial gains in test scores.

What is downplayed, however, is that the district had launched system-wide reforms in curriculum, teaching, and accountability years before schools were wired, computers bought, and technical assistance provided. Yet gains in academic achievement were attributed to teachers adopting computers, not structural and curricular reforms introduced years earlier.

Another example of the attribution error is the recurring bashing of “bad” teachers as the source of poor schooling in the U.S. (see here and here). Mary Kennedy points out the error that critics make in confusing the quality of teaching with teacher quality.

“We label teachers as caring, efficient, engaging, or boring, as if the events we see in classrooms sprang entirely from personal qualities that teachers bring with them when they enter the room…. [A]s our attention has recently turned to questions about teaching quality, we have started to examine the personal characteristics of our teachers–their credentials, licensure, test scores, skills, and personal values–and have overlooked aspects of their work that are outside their control, such as resources, planning time, and … school infrastructure that might influence the quality of teaching practice.”

Very smart people attributed to Chauncey Gardiner personal qualities of good breeding–-those splendidly tailored suits–-and substance as a thinker who speaks in sage metaphors. Rather than considering the situation in which Chauncey was really Chance the gardener. He could not read or write, and learned everything he knew from watching TV.  His employer, Ben Rand, and the President attributed wisdom to Chauncey. As Louise, the Black maid for the millionaire said about Chance, “you’re always going to be a little boy.”

Very smart people today attribute teachers’ classroom performance to their personal qualities and seldom consider the situation in which they labor. The context in which they labor matters greatly. Consider key factors such as the teacher’s daily work load, workplace conditions, unceasing bureaucratic demands, schools segregated by class and race, the use of fear and sanctions to spur improvement. All of these situational factors influence the what and how of teaching and learning.

“Being There” is a film. In the politics of schooling, however, where making judgments  that attribute sole power to personal traits of teachers rather than examining the context of schools and communities is a policy mistake. One that is made again and again in contemporary teacher-bashing that has significant consequences for the nation.

From time to time, I riffle through my writings looking for those that bring back memories of once fierce battles among educators and taxpayers. Buying laptops for each student was one of those battles.

In the early 2000s, skirmishes over the cost and effectiveness of large-scale purchases of devices produced conflict among many educators and taxpayers. In 2025, however, no more battles. Laptops are as common as pencils and paper in America’s schools. This essay on laptops appeared nearly two decades ago.

For many years, I have been a skeptic about putting computers in classrooms to transform teaching and learning. Sure, I got called lots of names from champions of desktops and vendors—“Luddite” being the more printable one—but I always considered the source. My reasons for being dubious were simple: No evidence was available for improved learning, better teaching, and students’ getting high-salaried jobs after graduation to justify large expenditures to wire buildings, buy hardware, and crow about high-tech schooling. But in the past few years, much of that name-calling has faded.

Now, conversations about computers in schools have become far less testy. Moreover, costs for laptops and tablets have come down dramatically. Still, two tough questions remain unanswered:

*Why don’t most teachers integrate new technologies into their daily instruction?

*When teachers do integrate use of devices into their lessons, why is it so hard to show that student use of these classroom technologies has led to gains in academic achievement?

These questions could be asked now but they are not.

The argument for each student’s having a laptop goes something like this: Every student has a textbook, pen, and paper; therefore, every student should also have a computer. Computers are tools of the trade, so to speak. In what business, hospital, or police precinct, advocates ask, would four or five employees, doctors, or officers have to compete for one computer? None. Even when we turn in our rental cars, they argue, the person in charge has a hand-held computer. If America wants productive future employees, give every student a laptop to use in school.

With many districts already having one-to-one access, what has happened in classrooms? Journalistic accounts and surveys of 1:1 programs in Maine; Henrico County, Va.; Fullerton, Calif.; and individual districts scattered across the country report extraordinary enthusiasm. Teachers tell of higher motivation from previously lackluster students, and more engagement in lessons. Students and parents describe similar high levels of use and interest in learning.

Yet much of this is drawn largely from teacher and student self-reports. Without researchers’ direct observation of classroom lessons for sustained periods of time to confirm these self-reports, doubts about teacher claims of daily use and students’ long-term engagement are in order. A few researchers have done this. Consider, for example, the work of Judith Sandholtz and her colleagues on the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow, or ACOT, program between 1985 and 1998.

The original ACOT project distributed two desktop computers (one for home and one for school) to every student and teacher in five elementary and secondary classrooms across the country, eventually expanding to other classrooms and schools. ACOT researchers reported positively about student engagement, collaboration, and independent work, much as 1:1 researchers do today.

But they also found that for teachers to use computers as learning tools, a 1:1 ratio was unnecessary. In elementary and secondary classrooms, a half-dozen computers could achieve the same level of weekly use and maintain the other tasks that teachers and students had to accomplish. Few people, however, have ever heard of the ACOT experiment.

Even if champions of laptops had heard of ACOT and found the positive results convincing, those who pay for public schools want more than the tap-tap-tap of keys in classrooms. Policymakers, parents, and taxpayers expect teachers to make children literate and numerate while also promoting moral behavior, civic engagement, and a better society. They expect teachers to maintain order in their classrooms, make sure students are respectful and dutifully complete their work, and ensure that those in their charge achieve curriculum standards as measured by tests. Abundant access to new technologies is almost beside the point. Except for achievement.

The fact is that one-to-one access has failed to show a direct link to improved test scores. For the past 80 years of research on technology’s impact on learning, from primitive projectors to modern laptops, not much reliable evidence has emerged to give impartial observers confidence that students’ use of computers or any other electronic device leads directly to improved academic achievement.

What causes enthusiasts to attribute gains in achievement to laptops? Again and again, officials mistake the medium of instruction—laptops—for how teachers teach. Smart people have said for decades that personal computers, laptops, and hand-held devices are only vehicles for transporting instructional content and skills; machines are not what teachers do in classrooms. Teachers ask questions, give examples, lecture, guide discussion, drill, use small groups, individualize instruction, organize project-based learning, and craft blends of these and other teaching practices.

University of Southern California psychologist Richard E. Clark put it succinctly many years ago: Media like television, film, and computers “deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition.” Alan Kay, who invented the prototype for a laptop in 1968, made a similar point when he said that schools confuse the music with the instrument. “You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won’t give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people.” The music is in the teacher, not the piano.

But school boards eager to show laptops boosting achievement forget the distinction. The typical study of 1:1 laptop programs compares the test scores of students in classrooms with laptops to those students in other classrooms without them. Yet (and this is a very big “yet”) these studies seldom use the same teacher for both the laptop and non-laptop classes. Nor do they ever describe and examine how teachers teach during the time of the study. These researchers have confused the piano with the music teacher. So when initial gains in test scores occur, they are attributed to laptops, not to what students bring to the lesson or what and how the teacher teaches.

One-to-one laptop programs are popular. Districts compete to become the first in their area to achieve the ratio. Yet the hype shrouds easily available facts about teaching, learning, and what schools are expected to do. Not to be skeptical at moments like this invites brain death.

AFTER-NOTE: Within less than a decade after this essay was published, the issue of buying laptops had largely disappeared. Since then, U.S. school districts (over 13,000 in the nation) have purchased laptops for each and every student.

My skepticism of nearly two decades ago about 1:1 laptop programs being responsible for increases in students’ academic achievement, however, still remains intact in 2025. I have yet to find a body of reliable and convincing evidence that students using electronic devices in school boost their academic performance. If readers know of such studies, please let me know.

“Ivy Sage is a support facilitator for Algebra 1A and Algebra 1 for ninth and 10th grades at Pine Ridge High School, in Deltona, Florida. She has been teaching for four years.”

This article appeared in Chalkbeat, March 14, 2025.

During my first year of teaching, I had little clue what I was doing. I had no training, was on a temporary teacher’s license, and was thrown into this position after another educator left two weeks before the school year started.

I wanted to make math engaging for my students, but in reality, my seventh graders struggled to retain anything I “taught” them. Every day, we embarked on a new activity. We were up and moving, doing group work, and giving presentations.

But my nontraditional approach to teaching mathematics wasn’t working. I knew this because my students were falling behind the pacing guide the school district had given to me. My students were also failing their district assessments.

At the Deltona, Florida, middle school where I was working, I was so focused on being known as the young, cool teacher that I lost sight of what was important: getting the kids to learn and understand the material.

I tried to model myself after one of my favorite high school English teachers, but I couldn’t exactly replicate her creative literature lessons when teaching about rational numbers and probability.

My colleagues assumed that I was best positioned to understand students’ technology use, social behaviors, and slang — and while that was true, it didn’t necessarily translate into middle school math skills.

After driving myself mad with creative but ineffective lessons, I decided to reach out to a more experienced teacher to see what I was doing wrong. She told me to stop worrying so much about what the kids think of me and prioritize what they need to succeed. She helped me analyze my students’ classwork and test scores and taught me how to devise lesson plans.

The first thing she ever told me was to take a deep breath before planning out lessons. Then, she showed me how to plan nine weeks at a time, align my calendar with district deadlines, and use color-coordinated organizers — pink for group activities, for example, and blue for tests — to stay on track. She encouraged me to do student surveys with questions like “What do you like most about yourself?” and “What are your hobbies?” to get to know the kids better.

I am currently a fourth-year teacher — these days, I teach algebra to ninth and 10th graders. I realize now that much of what tripped me up early on was that I didn’t understand how to differentiate my lessons to meet the needs of diverse learners. What I found out the hard way is that differentiation means creating a lesson that meets the needs of each type of learner.

Changing course, I was able to stretch out my lessons over multiple days. I typically only needed three days to cover one section — on expressions, equations, and inequalities, say — and I was able to teach multiple types of learners in those three days.

On the first day of teaching a new section, I catered to the visual and auditory learners. Students were given guided notes that had definitions, example problems, and fill-in-the-blank statements. On the second day, I catered to the more hands-on learners, with gallery walks, scavenger hunts, and partner activities. On the third and final day, I would check students’ understanding of the concepts with a mini quiz, a Jeopardy! style classroom contest, or group discussion.

Many of my students had processing challenges and took longer to understand what I was teaching; I had to change how I taught my lessons and timeline so they could be successful in my class.

I learned from colleagues that every first-year teacher makes mistakes differentiating their lessons because of the pressure they are under. New teachers may also imagine cracking the code on creative and engaging lessons without considering that those lessons might not be what their students need.

I am still learning. Every child learns differently. I learned in my first year of teaching that not every kid wants to play educational games in class. Some might want to sit down, take notes, and work in a traditional setting because that’s how they feel they will succeed.

By the end of my first year teaching, my students’ math scores were up, the kids were more engaged, and by catering to my kids’ needs more, they were having fun.

Here are some cartoons that tickle me about different facets of teaching and studenting. Enjoy!

McJobs has come to mean low-paying jobs in fast-food businesses. These jobs have limited skill requirements and employee turnover is high. Workers’ tasks are laid out clearly and the work is supervised closely by managers.

A kissing cousin of McJobs is what I call McTeaching. It is where tightly sequenced software with accompanying worksheets and quizzes, especially in credit recovery courses, become the meat-and-potatoes curriculum for secondary school teachers and students.

Higher-level McJobs are those online courses with live teachers lecturing in a studio. These courses have step-by-step rules for limited face-to-face engagement with distant learners. Online instruction, however, generally has lower prestige among teachers who face students daily in classrooms.

Surely, there is much variation in online instruction both in K-12 and higher education venues. The history of using the Internet for all forms of education has multiple roots and branches guaranteeing differences. Web-based courses, for example, differ in delivery. Some emanate from virtual schools with a curricular menu of software and teacher-directed courses; others are courses with online teachers having discussions in real time with periodic face-to-face contact. Online students range from home schoolers to those enrolled in International Baccalaureate diploma programs and Advanced Placement courses to those taking courses for university degrees such as a Masters of Business Administration (MBA). Then there are all those students who have failed courses and sign up for credit recovery.

The quality of online instruction also varies. There are stars among instructors who relish the work, plan thoughtfully, use the limited face-to-face interaction and discussion threads during the course creatively, and offer many stories of student success. Software designers have also created programs that both entice and push students through carefully sequenced lessons sufficient to teach complicated concepts clearly and crisply. Such stellar performers and well-designed software turn some McJobs into superb opportunities. But most online instructors and software programs plod along well-worn roads that only highly-motivated, independent students can traverse to finish the journey.

Even if those who tout online learning (derisively called “click-click” courses by critics) as a “disruptive innovation” that will replace regular schools or, those advocates of “blended learning” (sometimes called “hybrid” schools) spread their gospel, two facts about McTeaching are incontrovertible.

First, online teaching costs less per student than regular classroom teaching (see here,pp.7,80; and national_report, p. 7). At a time of rampant budget cuts, online instruction with lower instructional costs and seemingly positive student results (finalreport-5) give champions of web-based instruction from Bill Gates to the Idaho state superintendent evidence to tout the efficiency and effectiveness of applying high-tech solutions to delivering instruction.

Second, online learning offers limited face-to-face interactions between teachers and students compared to regular classroom instruction. Most online instructional enthusiasts assume that effective teacher lectures, software, programmed lessons, video clips,  exercises, and tests will achieve the goal of transferring knowledge from teacher to learner.

But different assumptions prevail for actual classroom teaching: the trust that grows from sustained face-to-face relationship between teacher and student is fundamental for learning; teachers develop teaching persona and emotional relationships with students (e.g., Rafe Esquith, Jaime Escalanate, Erin Gruwell) that students come to recognize and expect as lessons unfold; teaching is a performance (Am Educ Res J-1994-Pineau-3-25) and the “constant living interaction between teacher and audience makes every performance a new event.”

No, I am not romanticizing regular classroom teaching. I do know the variation among teachers’ personas and their teaching that occurs within the same school and across a district. I also know the inherent dilemmas that teachers face when bonds of affection develop with their students and when they risk losing those affections in pressing students to think harder and dig deeper into the subject matter. Or when they try to individualize instruction for 30-plus students. Further, I know well the uneven and too often low quality of teaching that occurs in largely poor and minority schools. So, I will not make every urban teacher a Rafe Esquith or Erin Gruwell.

The point I want to make is that the purposes of teaching include but go far beyond transmitting knowledge, the aim driving McTeaching. Most classroom teachers want to develop close relationships with students that foster their desire to learn more about the world, themselves, and others.

For those who seek the benefits of individualizing instruction through online lessons while having live teachers available in classrooms to teach group lessons–what some call “blended learning” or “hybrid” schools–the combination of online and actual teachers does defuse some of the criticism leveled by both parents and teachers at offering students a full menu of online instruction.

Yes, the cost of such “hybrid” schools once up and running still remains less than fully staffed conventional schools, a fact evident to anyone who can read a budget. Cheaper to do and employing different assumptions about teaching and learning, cheerleaders for more McTeaching offer policymakers ways of cutting district budgets by increasing online instruction. Experts have yet to put a price on what’s lost when face-to-face interactions between students and teachers go the way of bolted-down desks and McTeaching becomes the norm.

Each of us has had nightmares in our lifetimes. Here is my fantasy about a school reformer’s worst nightmare.

I am in a classroom. The doors are locked. The windows have wooden blinds and they are pulled shut. There are close to 50 adults sitting in bolted-down desks arranged in nine rows facing a teacher’s desk and whiteboard. I am sitting at a graffiti-ridden desk at the end of the third row. The teacher looks like Ms Bowler my eighth grade English teacher who had required each of us to recite “Abou Ben Adhem” publicly; she is berating us now for not listening to the report that each adult is giving. She wants us to fold our hands on our scarred desks and give each “student” our fullest attention or, she says, we will not be able to leave the room….ever.

She begins by calling upon the first adult sitting in the first row next to the door who had reported yesterday–yes, in this nightmare we have been locked in this classroom for two days. After the first report, she will call upon the second person in the same row, and then the third. Ordinarily, I would have been able to figure out how long it would take before Ms Bowler would call upon me to walk to the front of the room except the teacher had said that the report could be as long as each of us wanted it to be. Yesterday, only three “students” gave their reports; it took 24 hours for them to finish. We were not allowed to go to the bathrooms or eat meals.

And what were these reports about? Ms. Bowler required us to report on school reforms that would solve the problems of U.S. education in a competitive global economy. When we were all finished, she would unlock the door and we could leave the room. The class was made up of every stripe of school reformer from progressives who wanted to drop standardized testing and adopt project-based learning to centrists who believed that schools could be improved from the inside to market-based entrepreneurs who adored charter school to school-haters and high-tech enthusiasts.

The first reformer reported on online schooling, giving the class example after example of lessons from online courses offered at top universities, state-sponsored cyber-academies, and for-profit companies. She told us about such courses as “Artificial Intelligence for Dummies,” “Shakespeare’s Worst Plays,” “The History of Quantum Physics from Archimedes to Richard Feynman,” and “Skin Care for Boys and Girls.” That presentation on an interactive white board took 10 hours.

The second reformer took six hours. He told the class about his new algorithm for evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ test scores. The equation had 62 variables in it (appearing on a transparency he had made for the old overhead projector in the room). The reformer, gaining enthusiasm with every variable he introduced, proceeded to lecture on each variable in the algorithm ending with a gush of words about how implementing this evaluation plan through 180 daily observations of teachers would determine which teachers were highly effective, which were OK, which were mediocre, and which ones should be fired.

The third reformer got up and passed out a 40-page stapled copy of 152 slides for a PowerPoint presentation that she was going to give on what the research has shown thus far on how standardized testing had ruined public schools. She then proceeded to read each bullet-point on each slide as we followed her word-for-word on the printed copy. Each slide was a study of how tests had narrowed the curriculum and forced teachers into test prep lessons. Slides detailed the research design, the methodology, the findings, and the outcomes for both students and teachers. That non-stop, hurried presentation took eight hours.

That was yesterday. Now, Ms. Bowler told us we would re-start the presentations on online instruction, teacher evaluation, and ending standardized tests since we had lagged in our attention yesterday. How long it would be before it was my turn, I did not know. Could Ms. Bowler, after hearing the three presentations a second time, castigate all of us for insufficient attention and have the reformers repeat it the following day? I did not know. But I feared–a cold sweat bathed me–how many more days I would have to sit at my desk with folded hands listening to reformer after reformer lecture on how best to solve the U.S.’s national problem of failing schools. There was no exit.

That is my take on what a reformer’s nightmare might be like.

Historically, state capitals, district school boards, and the federal governments make policies for classroom teachers. Teachers are then expected to put these policies into practice. Few school observers, however, acknowledge that teachers not only implement policies but they also make policies for their students.

Remember those classroom rules often listed on classroom bulletin boards and walls? They are teacher-made policies.

OK, teachers make classroom policies but what about those federal, state, and local policies that officials regularly send to district classrooms. For example, state and district officials expect teachers to cover mandated curriculum content and cognitive skills. Also, districts direct teachers to prepare students for state tests.

Teachers, then, are policy implementers. But they also make policies for their classrooms (see above). In addition, teachers become policymakers in what they accept, amend, and reject from district and state directives. From demanding that teachers use cooperative group work to differentiating instruction to integrating digital devices into their daily lessons, teachers, constrained as they are by the “grammar of schooling,” nonetheless, still determine what content and skills to teach and how they will teach both. In short, teachers have limited autonomy to make classroom policies while also implementing policies made by others. One way of making clear how teachers both make and implement policies is resorting to metaphors.

Different metaphors to describe teachers making and implementing policies

Observers watching a policy travel from the White House, a state capitol, or a big city school board to a kindergarten or Algebra teacher have compared the journey to metal links in a long chain, the children’s game of Telephone, pushing wet spaghetti, and street-level bureaucracy.

For example, the metaphor of classroom teachers as iron-forged links in a chain convey military images of privates saluting sergeants, who, in turn, obey lieutenant orders continuing up the chain of command to majors and eventually, generals. The metaphor of the Telephone game, on the other hand, suggests how communications go astray often ending up in hilarious misinterpretations of what was intended by the original policy. Or consider the metaphor of pushing strands of wet spaghetti. It suggests futility in ever getting a policy put into practice in classrooms. And, finally, comparing teachers to street-level bureaucrats working in rule-driven organizations acknowledges that, at the least, teachers do have a small slice of discretion in making classroom decisions.

I want to expand on this metaphor of teachers as “street-level bureaucrats.” They are professionals like police officers who decide whether or not to give a traffic citation. They are social workers who determine what kind of help a client needs and where to find that help. They are emergency room nurses who decide which sick and injured patients need immediate attention and which ones can wait longer. Ditto for classroom teachers who has to make quick decisions during a lesson when a student asks an unexpected question or the class gets stuck on an algebraic equation or resists an assignment.

Not only are teachers “street-level bureaucrats.” Police officers, social workers, and nurses like teachers work within large, rule-driven organizations but interact with their clients, patients, and students daily as they make on-the-spot decisions. Each of these professionals is obligated to follow organizational rules yet still has limited discretion in making decisions. They interpret, amend, and implement decisions handed down by their superiors. And in doing so, they end up making policies for their clients, patients, and students.

HP is a dear friend of mine who prefers anonymity. What he has to say about teaching writing is important for those teachers, administrators, and parents who fret about AI’s effects on students’ writing. HP sees more of an upside than a downside for both teachers and students using AI to write essays, reports, and research papers. An earlier post of his on writing appeared here.

Peter Elbow died last month, at the age of 88. Elbow advocated for a more student-centered and process-oriented approach to teaching writing. He emphasized the importance of producing an effect in a reader and revealing the self in words as achievements in the process of learning to write well.

Elbow’s approach included techniques like freewriting, where students write continuously without worrying about grammar, spelling, or punctuation, to help students overcome writer’s block and develop their authentic voice. Elbow also encouraged peer feedback and collaborative learning, allowing students to learn from each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

Many of his followers think that his methods help students become more confident and fluent writers. By focusing on the act of writing rather than the final product, students are able to develop their ideas more fully and express themselves more clearly.  

 Elbow proposed several specific techniques to help students develop their writing skills in a more organic and productive way. Some of those key techniques include:

1. Freewriting

Freewriting is when students write continuously for a set period (usually 10-15 minutes) without worrying about grammar, spelling, or punctuation. This helps students overcome writer’s block and encourages the flow of ideas. (I have used a variation on this idea in teaching teachers to teach writing, which I call “Keep Writing.” Instructions include rewriting the last sentence whenever you get stuck).

2. Loop Writing

Loop writing involves taking a piece of freewriting and identifying a central idea or interesting point. Students then write a new piece focusing on that idea, allowing them to delve deeper into their thoughts and refine their writing.

3. Collaborative Writing

Students work together on writing projects. 

4. Peer Feedback

In Elbow’s approach, peer feedback is crucial. Students review each other’s work and provide constructive criticism. This helps writers see their work from different perspectives and learn how to revise effectively.

5. Writing with a Reader in Mind

Elbow believed that considering the audience is essential. He encouraged students to write with a specific reader in mind, helping them to focus their message and make their writing more engaging.*

_____________________________________

*There are a few AI writing tools that can help readers who would like to adopt Elbow’s approach to writing:

 Sudowrite is an AI tool specifically designed for fiction writers. It helps generate story ideas, plot points, and character descriptions, making it easier to develop creative writing projects.

 WordTune is an AI writing tool that helps you rephrase sentences, improve clarity, and enhance the overall quality of your writing. It offers suggestions for alternative wordings and styles.

 Quillbot is a paraphrasing tool that helps students rephrase sentences to make them more concise and clear. It also offers a summarizer and grammar checker.

Jasper is a versatile AI writing tool that can generate content for various purposes, including essays, and creative writing.

“Margaret Renkl, a [contributing New York Times] Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.” This article appeared in The New York Times, February 24, 2025.

It was dark outside, a late afternoon in the fall of 1986. As I did each week during my last year of graduate school, I was sitting with my thesis director, the poet James Dickey. Campus was lively with classes convening and dismissing, but the darkness pooling outside made me feel we were isolated, marooned together in a place where words were life-or-death matters.

That’s the way I felt, anyway. I couldn’t say how Mr. Dickey felt. Our relationship was strictly that of teacher and student. I thought of him as an old man. He was exactly the age I am now.

I remember that particular meeting because of one ill-chosen word. In a poem that was otherwise finished, a single adjective was clearly wrong. We batted alternatives back and forth across the desk, but none was right. I was determined to find the word that belonged there, the one that clicked into place like the halves of a locket.

Hours later, sometime around 10 o’clock, the right word came to me, popping up out of the depths while my mind was occupied with something else. It was so apt, and I was so exultant, that I went straight to the kitchen, opened the phone book, and looked up Mr. Dickey’s number. When he answered, I said, “‘Pale.’ The word is ‘pale.’” 

It didn’t dawn on me at the time that 10 o’clock is awfully late to be calling anyone, let alone an aging professor. But Mr. Dickey was overjoyed about that word, every bit as jubilant as I was. If only for a moment, the world made a kind of sense it hadn’t made before.

I had not thought about that phone call, much less that poem, in many years, but I’ve begun to think about it often. A flurry of “A.I. assistants” has suddenly colonized my inboxes and Word documents and texts. This month they appeared out of nowhere, like a swarm of fruit flies around an overripe banana. Everything I type now is thick with hovering robots suggesting unwelcome robot words.

Outlook supplies “an intelligent email companion.” Yahoo provides “email summaries, messaging-inspired interface and a gamified experience.” Google offers to “supercharge” my ideas. Now when I call a corporation’s customer-service department, I get a robot who asks, “Can I text you a link to chat with our virtual assistant?” The robots that answer phones, it seems, are being sunsetted by robots that can text. But then Apple’s robot takes over to summarize the corporate robot’s message before ever delivering the text itself.

(Microsoft is now informing me that “sunsetted” is not a word. It suggests using “unsettled,” “sonneted” or “unwetted” instead….)

I have spent hours trying to kill these ghosts in my machine. I can sometimes adjust my settings to disable the A.I. assistant, but the next software update turns it right back on again. In some cases, I can’t turn it off at all. The robots are relentless.

The writing teachers I know struggle to persuade their students not to use these tools. They are everywhere now, impossible to swat away. Who could blame a young writer for wondering how using these “assistants” is any different from using spell check or letting Siri supply the next word in a text? Besides, if they don’t use these tools, won’t they be falling behind the many students who do? It’s a fair point.

But letting a robot structure your argument, or flatten your style by removing the quirky elements, is dangerous. It’s a streamlined way to flatten the human mind, to homogenize human thought. We know who we are, at least in part, by finding the words — messy, imprecise, unexpected — to tell others, and ourselves, how we see the world. The world which no one else sees in exactly that way.

Who was it who first said, “I don’t know what I think until I see what I write”? Versions of this statement have been attributed to writers as various as Joan Didion, William Faulkner, Stephen King and Flannery O’Connor. Google’s robot doesn’t know who actually said it, but almost anybody who writes, whatever they write, will tell you it’s true.

In “I, Robot,” the 2004 film loosely inspired by Isaac Asimov’s classic sci-fi novel of the same name, one robot is unlike all the others of its model. It has feelings. It learns to recognize human nuance, to solve problems with human creativity. And with those attributes comes the questions inevitably raised by being human. Twenty-six minutes into the film, the robot asks, plaintively, “What am I?” This is a question writers ask every day. I suspect everyone else does, too

Sure, there’s a difference between writing a poem and cleaning up a garbled email, between writing a love letter and a Google ad. For some tasks, employing the use of an A.I. assistant might save time without levying a commensurate cost in humanity. Maybe.

I’m still not sure. The practice involved in rote writing tasks may be the very thing that inspires us to open a journal or write a letter or commit to paper a memory from the distant past. “No robot may harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm” reads Asimov’s first law of robotics. But what if the existence of robots itself is what robs us of our humanity? Is that not a way of bringing humans to harm?

Somewhere in my house there is a bound copy of the master’s thesis I spent two years writing. I remember very little about that poetry collection. I know its title (“Small Comforts”), and I know it included a poem about the nuptial flight of ants. Probably there was one about the taste of ripe figs, too, and at least one about a rat snake. I have such delightful memories of those things, but I’m only guessing that I turned them into poems. So much from that time is lost to memory.

But I remember one poem in which the word “pale” figured prominently. And what I learned in struggling to find it has lasted through nearly four decades. The search for the right word to fill the right place can occupy a lifetime. And, I’m convinced, make a self along the way.

I have gathered comments from teachers who have used AI in daily lessons and grading student work.

Last summer, Jen Roberts, an English teacher at Point Loma High School in San Diego, went to a training session to learn how to use Writable, an AI tool that automates grading writing assignments and gives students feedback powered by OpenAI. For the past school year, Roberts used Writable and other AI tools in the classroom, and she said it’s been the best year yet of nearly three decades of teaching. Roberts said it has made her students better writers, not because AI did the writing for them, but because automated feedback can tell her students faster than she can how to improve, which in turn allows her to hand out more writing assignments.  

“At this point last year, a lot of students were still struggling to write a paragraph, let alone an essay with evidence and claims and reasoning and explanation and elaboration and all of that,” Roberts said. “This year, they’re just getting there faster.”

Roberts feels Writable is “very accurate” when grading her students of average aptitude. But, she said, there’s a downside: It sometimes assigns high-performing students lower grades than merited and struggling students higher grades. She said she routinely checks answers when the AI grades assignments, but only checks the feedback it gives students occasionally. 

“In actual practicality, I do not look at the feedback it gives every single student,” she said. “That’s just not a great use of my time. But I do a lot of spot checking and I see what’s going on and if I see a student that I’m worried about get feedback, (I’m like) ‘Let me go look at what his feedback is and then go talk to him about that.’”

English teacher Jen Roberts checks her student’s work at Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024. Roberts uses AI platforms for classroom exercises and grading. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

High school English teacher in Texas

When ChatGPT first became publicly available it was almost immediately used by my students as a plagiarism tool. The timing was bad. I was preparing students for the AP English Literature exam and we were drilling quite a bit of fairly formulaic writing in the 300-400 word range, which ChatGPT is particularly well suited for. When the realization dawned on me that many of my students were using the tool unethically, my feelings [were] hurt. It was depressing in a genuinely existential way. As the leader of the English department for my school I held a meeting with the department and we crafted an acceptable use policy. This school year we started to proactively design procedures that would make it harder to use AI unethically and some teachers, myself included, have started finding ways to model ethical use. It’s been a roller coaster.

Another article on teachers using ChatGPT in lessons reported:

Some of those creative ideas are already in effect at Peninsula High School in Gig Harbor, about an hour from Seattle. In Erin Rossing’s precalculus class, a student got ChatGPT to generate a rap about vectors and trigonometry in the style of Kanye West, while geometry students used the program to write mathematical proofs in the style of raps, which they performed in a classroom competition. In Kara Beloate’s English-Language Arts class, she allowed students reading Shakespeare’s Othello to use ChatGPT to translate lines into modern English to help them understand the text, so that they could spend class time discussing the plot and themes. 

Teachers are also using ChatGPT to generate materials for students at different reading levels. Aileen Wallace, who teaches a class on current events in Falkirk, Scotland, said the tool could instantly produce simplified versions of readings on the causes of terrorism for 14-year-olds who either read at lower reading levels than the rest of the class or have been learning English as a second language. 

To be sure, ChatGPT doesn’t always get things right—but teachers are finding that provides its own way to engage students. Some are having students fact-check essays generated by the program in response to their prompts, hoping to simultaneously test students’ knowledge of the topic and show them the problems with relying on AI to do nuanced work. In Panama, International Baccalaureate teacher Anna May Drake had juniors and seniors critique a ChatGPT-generated essay comparing George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, while in the Detroit area, Sarah Millard, a ninth-grade honors English teacher, had students critique a ChatGPT-generated essay on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. “My students have never been so engaged in writing,” Millard says. “They wanted to beat the computer” and were “tearing apart” the AI-generated essay.

And other teachers offer their experiences with AI:

Tim Ballaret once dreamed of becoming a stockbroker but ultimately found fulfillment helping high school students in south Los Angeles understand the relevance of math and science to their daily lives. But making engaging class materials is time-consuming, so this spring he started experimenting with generative AI tools.

Recommendations by friends and influential teachers on social media led Ballaret to try MagicSchool, a tool for K-12 educators powered by OpenAI’s text generation algorithms. He used it for tasks like creating math word problems that match his students’ interests, like Taylor Swift and Minecraft, but the real test came when he used MagicSchool this summer to outline a year’s worth of lesson plans for a new applied science and engineering class.

“Taking back my summer helped me be more refreshed for a new school year,” he says. “When I’m not spending so much time at home doing these things, I’m able to spend more time with my family and my friends and my wife so I can be my best at work, instead of being tired or rundown.”

More comments from teachers:

“When writing a negative letter about grades to a parent, I go to AI to change the wording for me.”

—Middle school social studies | Indiana

“I use it as a tool to communicate with administrators and parents. I find it much quicker to type in the general idea and receive an email I could have written, but it would have taken me 15 minutes or more.”

—Elementary school | Utah

“I’ve used it to reword/edit recommendation letters and report card comments.”

—High school science | Michigan